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Schneier: We Need a Better Way of Regulating New Technologies (schneier.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, when a Brazilian judge shut down WhatsApp, it affected roughly half of the country's ~200 million residents. It's not the first time — or the second, or the third — that WhatsApp has faced legal pressure, and Bruce Schneier says it's clear evidence of a "massive power struggle" between internet companies and traditional companies. Central to this struggle is the inability of our lawmakers to quickly and effectively regulate new technologies. He says, "Traditionally, new technologies were adopted slowly over decades. There was time for people to figure them out, and for their social repercussions to percolate through society. Legislatures and courts had time to figure out rules for these technologies and how they should integrate into the existing legal structures. ... This isn't a simple matter of needing government to get out of the way and let companies battle in the marketplace. ... We need a better way of regulating new technologies. That's going to require bridging the gap between technologists and policymakers. Each needs to understand the other — not enough to be experts in each other's fields but enough to engage in meaningful conversations and debates. That's also going to require laws that are agile and written to be as technologically invariant as possible."
Or too experienced to be seduced by the shiny new new thing without some measured consideration. Your viewpoint may vary.
sPh
The reach of technology is, in most cases, world-wide. Do you expect people to be able to abide with all the rules and laws of all the countries on the planet? What's legal and morally accepted in one country is totally immoral and unlawful in another.
Probably because you can never have nice things if you always had to ask before you made them. Imagine if Sony had to ask permission to create betamax, I guarantee you that the government would have said "Oh, copyright infringement tool. Nope."
Most of the time, perceived risks (or rather, doom and gloom dystopias) never materialize.
...it's a feature.
Let the market decide, and let regulation catch up later (if ever).
We don't need "better" ways to regulate new technologies, we need smaller government that doesn't feel the need to stick its tentacles into every orifice of the body politic.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
While it is true that youth tends to latch on to what is touted as new and shiny whether it really is new, and really is valuable, or not....
The greater problem is that politicians, specifically, are not technicians and are very isolated from mainstream culture. Technologies which are shaping the culture of millions upon millions of people are completely new and foreign to them, and they don't have the time they need to really get their heads around the tech and what it means.
The recurring theme of needing encryption back doors is a good example. Those in power only see it as "they are keeping secrets from us!" They don't understand the technical landscape enough to realize how their back doors will ruin a foundational element of the emerging digital economy, to the severe detriment of everyone involved. They don't understand this because they didn't grow up with it, don't have the natural technical interest in learning about it, and don't have the time they need to gain a proper understanding. They demand that their aids give them an executive summary (which gives them an incomplete picture) and they run with their instincts (which were honed in a world that lacked these technologies).
That problem on their part overpowers the "shiny new is good" problem on the part of the youth.
Do I hear
We Need a Better Way to Protect Established Players and Corrupt Governments
?
Letter To Iran
Most of the people who are in power and makes laws are too old to even begin to comprehend how things work and how much they are a part of modern society.
Oh, FFS, stop blaming it on age. You want to argue it's because they are politicans, not techies? Sure, I'll buy that. Or that they haven't bothered to learn new things and keep up with changes to the world? Sure, I can buy that too. But age itself?
I am in my early 60's, at least as old as the average politician. Am i "too old to comprehend how things work"? I've designed parts of modern CPUs, and written C++ compiler optimizations targeted to them. I was on arpanet in 1981, and I wrote my first assembly language program in the late 1960's on a computer that filled a room and whose user interface had moving parts which could physically injure the careless.
You blame age, but I see young people cheerfully giving up every shred of their communications to companies like Facebook and Google. I see them preferring curated computing over free computing so that the former succeeds in the marketplace and the latter is dying out. I see them having NO awareness of whether their data is held on their own device or transmitted to a hundred unknown companies. I see them being increasingly unable to use computing systems with UIs more complex than I see as appropriate for grade-school children. I see them manually repeating trivial actions a hundred times in a row because they lack any ability to automate the task with a device invented to automate tasks. I see blank looks if I ask them to copy this file to that directory, because a grid of canned icons to launch the Facebook app and "like" selfies is the only way they are able to interact with a computer.
"Digital natives", my senile geezer ass.
My generation has legions and legions of technically clueless people, I will grant that. So does every generation. But the so-called digital natives are not exactly shining examples of wise decision making, taken as an entire group. I'm just along for the ride at this point, watching in abject horror.
Please, give the ageism a break.
Lawn. You know what to do.
Even as a pretty adamant liberal I recognize that a lot of lawmaking is the result of regulatory capture. Whenever a large commercial entity sits in an entrenched potion and siphons up money because regulations raise barriers to entry, we have a problem. Progress stagnates. Money gets wasted.
Disruptive businesses have a place. Sure they may skirt the law in new and interesting ways but they force industries to churn and change. The courts eventually settle matters. Luckily, law-making is an old institution that runs at a slow pace so disruption happens before regulatory capture can take hold.
Ride-share is a perfect example. Yes, Uber is obviously exploiting worker law loopholes and are likely exploiting their employees. Yes, they're skirting taxi law that's necessary to protect riders.
But on the flip side taxi institutions are some of the most abusive and exploitative examples of corrupt regulatory capture one could imagine. As a customer you pay way too fucking much for shitty service. Taxi drivers get shitty compensation for their work, face stifling fees, and work for companies that have obvious corrupt ties to local authorities that locked out competition.
The taxi institution NEEDED to be shakes down and broken. Mobile internet opened up a new type of service better than traditional taxi. On the upside the genie is out of the bottle. The public loves it. Uber likely won't go away now.
When the dust settles we'll likely see employment protection for Uber/lyft/whatever drivers, better service for customers, re-born taxi institutions forced to update in order to compete. Everyone will win, except the people who wanted to maintain the (awful) status quo.
See also: The hotel industry and the new internet-enabled room sharing services turning it upside down.
I second all this and would also add that this attitude has much worse repercussions than just to insult parent poster's "senile geezer ass." It also lulls people into a sense of complacency, with the thought that once the old guys retire and new blood gets in everything will be all better. That is certainly not true. For example, as pp points out, the Facebook generation isn't going to fight for open and interchangeable standards, since they hardly even know what those are. And one of my favorite /. sigs is the Woz quote about the cloud that ownership is what made America different than the USSR during the cold war.
Dumb 'pipes' (routers) with any application you can think of and build at the edges (hosts).
And yet the typical user uses it mainly for Netflix and Facebook on their iPhone. So while "permissionless innovation" is one model that the internet supports, it also supports the "government enforced copyright monopoly" model and the "ask permission from big corporations" model. There is an old saying that democracies like capitalism, but capitalism doesn't necessarily like democracy. The relationship between the internet and corporations is somewhat similar.
An awful lot of 'regulation of technology' is really the State 'regulating its citizens' - that is, by an attempt to restrict good encryption, or encryption without backdoors. Ask yourself if you trust the same people who are spying on your every communication.
As a technology pusher, I'm perfectly committed to obeying the law. However, that still means I can push technology that subverts the intent of a law and demonstrates how stupid it is.
Those are usually the kinds of laws that one has to observe to the letter, but that ought to be subverted for the good of the people.
How about a commitment by the technology-pushers to obey the law to start with?
No one really obeys the law, it is too vague and imprecise.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
on a computer that filled a room and whose user interface had moving parts which could physically injure the careless.
OK, I must know. Exposed tape reels from before the cool vacuum chamber tape drives? Carelessly designed card punch or printer paper output path?
OK. In my youth (early 70s) I worked on a computer in which the logic was all carried in the doors. They swung open and, being full of vacuum tubes, probably weighed in at around 100 Kg. Get hit in the head by one of these and you might wake up next week (or you might not).
To turn on the computer, you had to open the door (see above as a risk to others), reach past the exposed + and - 100 VDC buses, grasp the rubber grip on the drum memory drive shaft with your right had and spin the drum. Then you immediately turned on the power (remember the exposed power buses) with the left hand. If you didn't spin the drive, the electric motor generated too much torque for the system to handle and you got to spend a half hour replacing the sheared pin in the link between the motor and the drive shaft. See how many ways you can get hurt just turning the monster on.
If you find this hard to believe, visit either the Smithsonian in D.C. or the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, CA and looked at the Bendix (or CDC) G15 computer from the 1950s. Both had G15s on exhibit last I knew.
This is just the case of one small computer from the dark ages. You could also look up the IBM Photostore (which stored high density data on film) or the Datacell (both IBM and CDC made similar ones) for examples of computer hardware that could seriously hurt you. And these don't touch the more common risks from IBM Hollerith card hardware.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
Uber also routinely breaks numerous law put in place to protect consumers and citizens, often as a result of hard-won experience. Not sure what the legal or moral justification for that is, other than "I wanna".
sPh